Roy Cloud Fridays for Future

Have you heard about the global movement “Fridays For Future“? It is spearheaded by Greta Thundberg, a 16 year old student who last year spent many weeks striking in front of the Swedish Parliament. A lot has happened since:

Greta was invited to speak at the climate conference in NY in September and again in Madrid in December. Time magazine just announced her as Time person of the year 2019.

She triggered a movement around the world to strike for climate change on Fridays. We want to encourage Roy Cloud students & parents to, instead of striking, take the next step , & get informed about a few changes in their lives that they can take in order to stop climate change.

We started this series last September as part of climate activist week. These were incorporated into the weekly Thunderbolt newsletter. Did you not have time to follow up on them as they came along? Here’s the list for you to read up on in your time and…. Hopefully implement them now!!

Do you notice something around school that you think could be improved to reduce the school carbon footprint? Let us know your ideas here . From Gretas story we know, that if she can become a climate activist , you can too – or at least join her movement and become more climate-change aware.

1. RC FfF #1 – Walk to school (Thunderbolt 09/26/2019)

Have you heard about the global movement “Fridays For Future“? It is spearheaded by Greta Thundberg, a 16 year old student who last year spent many weeks striking in front of the Swedish Parliament. She as invited to speak at the climate conference in NY last week and gave a very emotional speech – this has triggered a movement around the world to strike for climate change on Fridays. We want to encourage Roy Cloud students to, instead of striking, take the next step , & get informed about a few changes in their lives that they can take in order to stop climate change.

Take the first step, ditch the car and WALK to school, at least some days of the week. Burning one gallon of gasoline creates about 20 pounds of CO2—which means the average vehicle creates roughly 6 to 9 tons of CO2 each year. So students – you do the math… How many miles/gallon does your family car need? How many miles do you ride to get to school every day? What is YOUR transportation carbon footprint?

2. RC FfF #2 – Pick up one piece of trash every time you are outside (Thunderbolt 10/03/2019)

The Great Pacific Garbage patch off our coast has reached twice the amount of Texas already today. With the rainy season starting soon, the trash lying on the streets will eventually land in the storm drains and make its way exactly to that garbage patch.

We can easily stop this trend – Can you imagine, if every human , every time they went outside just picked up one piece of trash and dispose of it properly? An interesting concept, extrapolated to the millions here:

To make it interesting for our youngsters, they can even register their trash here and see how much they are contributing.

Students , once more you can do the math: 750 Roy Cloud students (plus parents!) go outside at least 4 times a day (drop off, pickup, 2 recesses) If we picked up just one piece of trash every time (after making sure we don’t drop anything by accident, of course) – How much trash will we save from landing in the ocean?

3. RC FfF #3 – Eat up!/only buy what you eat (Thunderbolt 10/10/2019)

Whether it’s left on your plate or rotting in your fridge, wasted food is a big problem –38 million tons of food gets thrown away in the US each year, according to the EPA. Not only do we have to be aware that 95% of this wasted food lands on landfill and produces methane gases, but also the secondary carbon emissions of growing and cooking this wasted food (water, energy, transportation) has to be considered in your carbon bill.

Wasted food is a social problem: In 2013, 14.3 percent of U.S. households were food insecure at some time during the year. That is 48 million Americans, of which 16 million are children, living in food insecure households. Wholesome, nutritious food should feed people, not landfills.

Wasted food is an environmental problem: Food is the largest stream of materials in American trash. Once wasted food reaches landfills, it produces methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. → if you absolutely have to trash food, make sure you put it in the compost bin

Wasted food is an economic issue: It is estimated that at the retail and consumer levels in the United States, food loss and waste totals $161 billion dollars.

4. RC FfF #4 – Reduce Energy Consumption (Thunderbolt 10/17/2019)

With less than 5% of the world’s population, the U.S. consumes 17% of the world’s energy. Only 11% of the electric energy used is from renewable sources. So even if your vehicle or heat source is electric, your secondary carbon bill is not (yet) green. We can vastly reduce our carbon footprint by increasing the energy efficiency of our home.

This weeks’ challenge: make a conscious effort in switching off and unplugging unused appliances and turning off electronics rather than using standby – both tasks do not cost a dime to start with.

Fully turning off just one LCD TV (rather than leaving it on standby) for 18 hours a day will save about5kg CO2 a year!!

254 million tons of trash are being generated in the US each year. That’s a lot to find room for. There’s simplynowhere to put it all. The current recycling rate is only 34%. The effects of everyone making a conscious decisions on which bin to throw their trash in would be humongous. See here how ONE can make a difference Unsure where to place an item? Check out what goes where and what bin, 2 sorting guides Recology offers.

Better yet, reduce the use of items that later land in trash/recycle.

Bring your reusable water bottle to every event and make when purchasing items, check for recyclable materials.

Rather than. throwing away an item in workable condition, take the time to post them on freecycle, craigslist or nextdoor so someone else can still make use of it.

6. RC FfF #6 – Compost (Thunderbolt 10/31/2019)

Whatever you don’t eat, don’t let it end in land fill. Transforming food scraps, lawn clippings and leaves into fresh, nutrient-rich soil gives home gardens a boost . Roughly20 to 30 percent of what we normally throw out can be composted. You wait, and while you do, you create rich soil, save the city money on shipping organic waste to landfill where methane.

Starting a compost in your backyard is EASY: Find out how to make an easy compost bin with your kids and also find out what type of food should go in the compost bin. More benefits about composting and where to get free compost for your garden can be found here

Halloween pumpkins are very nutritious food for worms and decompose within days!!

Using a calculator to work out your carbon footprint is only the beginning of the journey, however it is a very important step. Using this information, a road map can be drawn indicating the best way to reduce carbon emissions and help slow down global warming and the greenhouse effect.

Are you planning on flying togo on vacation or see family over the holidays? One round-trip flight between New York and San Francisco contributes an average of 2 metric tons more to your bill. Several airlines and other organizations now have an option where youcan buy carbon offsets— which does make a difference, andexperts say it’s a valid way to even out.

9. RC FfF #9 A Carbon reduced Thanksgiving ( Thunderbolt 11/21/2019)

Turkey, Travel, Football – all things many do not want to miss on Thanksgiving.

As we approach the Thanksgiving break, many of us are planning travel and meals for Thanksgiving day. Any guesses what out of the above mentioned Thanksgiving favorites adds the most to your carbon bill?

It turns out that your food isn’t the biggest holiday culprit — traveling for the meal is.

Four people flying a 600-mile trip is the equivalent of 10 times the CO2 emissions of the Thanksgiving meal. Of course we would not want you to celebrate alone – so, like mentioned last week, consider purchasing carbon offsets for your travel.

As for the food – while pulutary is amongst the most carbon friendly proteins you can eat, if you can do without, it will definitely help – “The carbon footprint of a 16-pound turkey is the equivalent of one dish of turkey gravy, cranberry sauce, roasted Brussels sprouts, mashed potatoes, rolled biscuits and apple pie combined.”- And Then There’s The Issue Of Food Waste

For every product you get, ask yourself a million questions about how the item got there, how it was packaged, who made it, and how they made it. The more you buy from vendors that work on reducing their carbon footprint, the more companies will better serve our desire for a better planet.

While REI a few years back made some of us join their efforts to NOT participate in Black Friday and enjoy the day outside (#optoutside) , their mission this year is taking it one step further with their#opt-to-act action plan – 52 weeks to little by little make changes to our every day actions for a better planet – very much the same way as Roy Cloud has started it with these posts. Watch the video here to start. A checklist with the weekly activities can be found there as well as adescription of the activityto perform every week – little by little – and you can even get acalendar reminder every week to work on your activity.

Thanksgiving week also the2019 Emissions GAP reportwas published. According to the report, current measures will not keep global temperature increases within the 1.5-to-2-degree Celsius range that scientists urge us to try and accomplish. To get back on that goal, global greenhouse gas emissions must fall at least 7.6% every year to remove 32 gigatons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The25th United Nations Climate Change conference is progress this week and hopefully the world leaders will come up with a plan for us to reach this goal – but until then – lets continue to do our part- Follow the REI plan for this week and pick up the trash we see lying on the street – with the rain, it will all flow to the bay otherwise! – very much as we asked for in our Roy Cloud Fridays for Future #2 – pick up one piece of trash every day

12. RC FfF #12 – no more junk mail!! (Thunderbolt 12/12/2019)

According to a statistic by the University of Indiana , The average American uses seven trees a year in paper, wood, and other products made from trees. That’s roughly 2,000,000,000 trees per year! The amount of wood and paper we throw away each year is enough to heat 50,000,000 homes for 20 years.

The most alarming is, that out of these, 4 million tons are junk mail – unwanted, not asked and not even looked at!!Over 50 percent of this unsolicited mail ends up in landfill. While we know that most of you are choosing recycling over trash, you can also put a stop to even receiving these – for the price of $2 and 10 minutes of your time!

We are aligning this week’s Roy Cloud action plan once more with REI’s#opt-to-act action plan. Stop this waste of paper using this easy guide:

If you no longer want to receive these coupon packs , you can stop them here. The Federal Trade Commission also providesa detailed guidefor stopping a whole host of unsolicited mail.

Get a ‘no junk mail’ sticker to put on your mailbox – this won’t help in the junk mail to be produced, but at least it will help your mailbox to remain more controllable. Get another one for your friends and neighbors too!!

Wrapping paper contains a lot of foreign materials to make it shiny, and therefore is very often not recyclable – why not use these coloring book pages from first grade to wrap your presents in? Or wouldn’t it be fun to solve one or the other math equation when unwrapping presents out of your recycled math workbook? The Sunday funnies can in some situations make the wrap as interesting as the content. The opt-to-act-plan has numerous additional ideas on what to use as a wrapper – old towels, bedspreads, recyclable brown paper , or reusable shopping bags are just some more examples. If every American family wrapped just 3 presents in re-used materials, it would save enough paper to cover 45,000 football fields.

Do you also want to give a present to Earth? According to this article, the best you can do is to cut down on holiday waste. A Stanford Universityreport.states that 25 million extra tons of garbage are produced in the US between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve. Find some tips on how to limit the amount of garbage produced over the holidays here

For the past couple of weeks we’ve given you several tips on what you can do to improve your carbon footprint. Have you been keeping up with these? We listed them on the Roy Cloud webpage for you to revisit and implement.

Ready for more? Use a carbon footprint calculator, to find out to how much carbon emissions your current lifestyle translates to. You can also get an idea on what could positively influence it. Every little action counts! Make it a habit to implement them on a regular basis – like pledging to walk to school at least once per week. Enter your anticipated actions for the year into the carbon footprint calculator to get in instant estimate on how much your actions help over the year.

Today, an average person living in North America or Western Europe consumes 100 kilograms (220 pounds) ofplastic each year. Studies show that people around the world buy a total of one million plastic bottles per minute. That’s almost 1.5 billion plastic bottles per day! Each of us used an average of 167 plastic water bottles last year.

Plastic bottles require up to 700 years to dissolve.

90% of the cost of bottled water is the bottle itself.

80% of plastic bottles never get recycled.

38 million plastic bottles go to landfill each year in America alone.

Resources to learn more about plastic usage are everywhere these days. Even your neighbors on nextdoor posted 3 very interesting blogs during the last few weeks:

Go and see one of the movies there, or rent them from the library – but make sure to bring your own resuesable water bottle to the film fest or any other social event you are going to in 2020.

16. RC FfF #16 – get involved! (Thunderbolt 01/16/2020)

The third Monday of the year is considered the MLK day of service. Are you still looking for what you can do and at the same time help the environment? Here are two fantastic opportunities for this coming weekend:

Take the challenge – try to go one day without paper products – and if you don’t succeed, plant a tree!. Do this every month of 2020 and you may go carbon neutral on your paper usage for this year :-). There are a lot of easy ways to do so:

…And if you must use paper products, make sure you recycle them afterwards

18. RC FfF #18 – Don’t Bag it (Thunderbolt 01/30/2020)

California passed the plastic bag ban bill in 2014 and was the first state in the US to do so. This was a great step in the right direction – plastic bag use went down 90 percent.

But did you know, you can also return your old shopping bags to the retailer for proper recycling? And not only the shopping bag itself, also wrapping bags you get in the veggie isle, your amazon shipping envelopes , the wrapper around your kitchen roll and or bread.

19. RC Fff # 19 – Meatless Mondays (Thunderbolt 02/06/2020)

We have to come up with a diet that promises to save lives, feed 10 billion people and all without causing catastrophic damage to the planet.

A vegetarian diet eliminates a lot of overhead: If we feed plants to animals, and then eat the animals, we use more resources and produce more greenhouse gases than if we simply eat the plants.

We do not all have to become vegetarian tomorrow, skipping meat one day a week however sounds like it is very much doable. Over the course of a year, a person who participates in Meatless Mondays can reduce their carbon footprint – by 1 TON! (Penn State University)

If the average American cut just one-quarter pound of beef a week from their diet, it would be the equivalent of taking 10 Million cars off the road for a year (NRDC)

The energy savings from a single 1/4 lb. burger could power your iPhone – for 6 months! (Meatless Mondays)

Find these and many more tips on how to reduce the carbon foodprint of your food here.

Going local for food matters, but not as much as methane. Raising cattle and sheep creates vast amounts of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. Cutting out meat, or even reducing consumption and favoring fish and chicken, can seriously save carbon. Studies at Carnegie Mellonsuggest merely swapping red meat and dairy for a more balanced diet with fish, eggs, and fowl makes a big difference.

Like any “holiday”, also Valentines day leads to a lot ofwaste. But especially when thinking of the most important people in your life, it doesn’t have to be that way. You can do a lot without doing so much harm to your budget and the environment.

skip the card – even though everything seems to be digital these days, more than 180 million paper cards are still exchanged on Valentine’s Day. Evenrecycled cards will emit methane when they decompose in landfill.

Cook instead of eating out. Not only is cooking a meal at home better for your wallet, but it is also better for the environment, because it will mean less food waste and no to-go boxes.

More information about the effect of Valentines day on the environment can be found here. Did you forget to make Valentines arrangements and have no time now? You may just get away with emailing this article to your loved one!!

It takes lots of energy to pump, treat, and heat water, so saving water reduces greenhouse gas emissions. Did you know aleaky toilet can waste 200 gallons of water per day? Repair all toilet and faucet leaks right away. Use these easy tips to reduce your water consumption:

put a brick or a 2l water bottle in your toilet’s water tankYou will reduce the amount of water needed with every flush to refill the tank by the volume of whatever object you put in there

install a laundry-to-landscape system, so your laundry’s greywater is used to water your (non-edible!) plants – follow the regulations here

Turn off faucets. Start saving by breaking a bad habit: Never let faucet water run needlessly as you wash or rinse dishes, wash your hands or face, brush your teeth or shave. Bathroom faucets run at about 2 gallons of water a minute, according to the EPA.

install a slow flow showerhead – you can even get them for free in Redwood City when checking out a energy saving toolkit here

Capture rainwater. Find ways to save and store rainwater for use in the garden. It’s easy to catch roof water from gutters and downspouts, is one easy way. Remember to cover your barrels to keep mosquitoes at bay.

Later in the week the richest American announced that he will donate 10 billion dollars to the Bezos Earth Fund, an organization founded to fight climate change.

A big win also in transparency – San Mateo County is spearheading a project with Google and their newly announced Environmental Insight Explorer tool, which calculates and displays city and countywide data on emissions and solar potential.

The coming week will be equally important: when you cast your vote on super Tuesday, check for the candidate with the environmental program that appeals most to you. Find out here where the candidates stand on climate change.

It is great to see how you do your part in following our weekly suggestions and think about the environment before you buy or use plastic products – and at the same time on a broader scale see changes happening through ordinances and funding.

Keep up the good work, and don’t forget to take your reusable water bottle everywhere!!